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What Americans Don’t Get About Putin

The staging of the Sochi Games reflects something deeper about Russian behavior.

By GREGORY FEIFER

February 12, 2014

Two decades after the Soviet collapse, the Russians think they’re finally winning the Cold War. At least that’s what you might conclude from the diplomatic jousting surrounding the Sochi Olympic Games, which is a metaphor for U.S.-Russia relations.

Case in point: the recent leaking of a taped, F-bomb-laden conversation apparently between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador to Ukraine, which shows the KGB’s successors—if that’s who did it, as commonly believed—are following the old textbook. This time around, however, it appears to be working far better than the Kremlin’s cold warriors could have dreamed.

Moscow has accused Washington of scheming to overthrow Victor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s democratically elected president. The Nuland recording appeared to provide proof, complete with a detailed discussion of exactly who among the opposition leaders should replace him. Releasing the recording just before the start of the Olympic Games enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to bask in the full glory of the world’s acclaim during his main act: the lavish opening ceremony. It had the added benefit of driving another wedge between the United States and Europe, another Russian objective.

Once again, Washington was caught with pants down, embarrassed by an aggressively sly maneuver Americans hadn’t considered even to be an option. Isn’t the Cold War over, after all? Surely it’s now in everyone’s interests to try to get along.

Perhaps. But more than simply Soviet influence, the staging of the Sochi Games reflects something deeper about Russian behavior, which Americans generally find mysterious. Why do a majority of Russians continue to support the authoritarian Putin, who’s overseen an explosion of corruption on top of destroying democracy? Have they learned nothing from their very painful past?

Russian behavior is often explained away with Winston Churchill’s description of the country as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Or by evoking a Russian soul that’s unknowable because it’s supposedly different.

Of course there’s no otherworldly Russian soul. Their way of doing things tends to appear illogical to us not because it’s irrational, but because many Russian values and motives differ from ours. In fact, Russian actions are eminently understandable because they’re grounded in very practical reasons and often successful at achieving aims dictated by their own internal logic.

For example, the conventional wisdom is that Putin has ruled according to an unwritten social contract with the people: As long as living standards keep rising thanks to profits from Russia’s vast energy wealth, the Kremlin remains more or less free to pursue its authoritarian agenda.

But the real glue holding the population to Putin’s regime isn’t rising expectations but the country’s all-encompassing corruption, starting with the daily bribes Russians must pay to traffic police, building inspectors and most other officials with discretionary power.

A small business owner once described to me how the tax police froze his company’s bank account after claiming he’d failed to file a crucial document with his tax return. When he showed up at the tax police building with the proper paper bearing the right stamp, he was still made to wait in line at an office that never seemed to open.

“I kept returning,” he said, “until someone approached me to say he sympathized. Then he suggested I visit another office down the hall, where it was understood I’d pay a bribe and my problem would disappear.” He coughed up $500, and told me routine pressure like that is effective because it paralyzes companies. “Business owners will do anything to unfreeze their bank accounts.”

Other corruption is more blatant, such as the Sochi Games, the most expensive ever at more than $50 billion. Companies connected to one man earned more than $7 billion, roughly the same as the entire budget for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. That man happened to be Putin’s childhood friend and former judo partner.

Corruption coerces people because it enables the authorities to prosecute almost anyone. It also coopts them, however, by providing a feeling they, too, have a stake in the system. They’re getting something in return, after all—like the corner store owner who pays the local police to ensure no trouble comes to his business and feels he has one over his competition a couple blocks away.

That may help explain why more than 70 percent of respondents in a recent poll said they would refuse to protest against falling living standards or in support of their rights even as economic growth stagnates and fluctuating oil prices threaten the Kremlin’s ability to fulfill Putin’s campaign promises.

But there’s another factor behind Putin’s 14 years as Russian leader: the old Russian practice of bluffing.

One of the clearest recent examples was the presidency of Putin’s protégé Dmitry Medvedev, who warmed the boss’s seat after his limit of two consecutive terms expired in 2008. Western observers spent the four years of Medvedev’s tenure guessing when he would assume real power. In fact, his reforming, Western-looking image served to conceal the maneuverings of the real decision-maker before he returned to his old job.

The Sochi Olympics were part of the same project to shore up Putin’s personal power and carry him back to the presidency. Awarded to Russia in 2007, when Moscow was just reaching the height of its post-Soviet resurgence, they also came right as Putin was preparing to step down the following year. His victory delivering the games helped cement his image as crucial for Russia’s successes.

Seven years on, the release of the taped American phone conversation boosted Putin’s image as a successful world leader and humiliated the United States, which he’s designated as Russia’s main rival.

That’s an old game. Victor Cherkashin, the KGB officer who scored the service’s greatest successes by recruiting the spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen in Washington in 1986, once told me his greatest pride didn’t lie in the operations for which he’s best known. After all, Cherkashin said, those men had already decided they wanted to betray their country. All he’d had to do was convince them to go through with it.

His eyes lit up describing what he considered more creative work: his so-called black measures to set up innocent people for blackmail—accusing an American diplomat of collaborating with the Nazis, for example—or scoring public relations points by purporting to expose Western depravity.

But the Cold War-like maneuvers over Ukraine are more than mere puffery. Putin has helped push Russia’s southern neighbor toward the verge of civil war, which would have terrible consequences not only for Ukraine also but Russia.

That points to another facet of Putin’s rule: He makes decisions not in his country’s interest, but his own. Destabilizing Russia’s neighbors, picking fights with Washington and threatening to direct nuclear missiles at Western Europe may be dreadful for Russia’s image and prospects for integration into the international community, but at home, it shows Putin to be tough.

That’s why it’s important for the White House to stop dismissing Putin—in public at least—as simply a bored schoolkid at the back of the classroom, as President Barack Obama did again during his NBC interview before the Sochi opening ceremony. There’s too much at stake.

Deeply regrettable as Nuland’s amateurishness is, America’s top officials must do more than simply be careful about boorish talk on cellphones. As long as Putin believes he’s winning a new kind of Cold War, the Obama administration should stop hoping his professed desire to cooperate will make the problem go away. Tackling it should start by understanding his real motives.

Gregory Feifer is editor for Europe at Global Post and author most recently of Russians, a book about Russian behavior and society.